Friday, November 12, 2010

A Simple Outline Method in Detail

Yesterday, I introduced you to the simplest story outline you can possibly have, saying that every story can be broken into four equal sections, Problem, Solution, Challenge, and Victory. Today, we’ll look at how we can expand upon that idea to create an outline we can use for a book. Dividing a book into four sections isn’t much of an outline.

If you consider a book that has 200 pages and 20 chapters (for simplicity of math) that we’ve outlined using this method, each of the four sections has 50 pages and 5 chapters. There’s a lot that can happen in 5 chapters. So we would like to provide more detail to our outline. One way to start is to say that each of our four sections is a story within a story. We know how to outline a story. From yesterday, we can record the following outline in a text document:

Problem: Anna needs a man.

Solution: Anna gets to know an attractive man named Chris.

Challenge: Anna learns Chris is engaged to Beth.

Victory: Anna shows Chris that she’s a better choice than Beth.

To add detail, we need only to repeat the same process for each of the four sections. We can start were we choose. The following is what the outline would look like if we started with the Challenge section:

Problem: Anna needs a man.

Solution: Anna gets to know an attractive man named Chris.

Challenge: Anna learns Chris is engaged to Beth.

P: Anna needs to grow her business.

S: Anna begins advertising.

C: People visit the shop, but are turned off by how it looks.

V: Chris introduces Anna to Beth, an interior decorator and his fiancée.

Victory: Anna shows Chris that she’s a better choice than Beth.

Notice that in moving deeper into the story we’ve started to say more about who these people are and what they do. We’ve also moved away from the basic love story somewhat into the B-plot somewhat. The love story will play out but over the structure of what is going on with Anna’s shop. In the preceding sections of the book, we may have had Anna beginning her business, which creates the problem we see in the Challenge section.

Depending on your style, this may be enough of an outline, but we can go deeper. Keep in mind that each of the subsections we just added related to more than one chapter. If we divide those subsections the same way we may come closer to having it broken into scenes. For example:

Problem: Anna needs a man.

Solution: Anna gets to know an attractive man named Chris.

Challenge: Anna learns Chris is engaged to Beth.

P: Anna needs to grow her business.

S: Anna begins advertising.

P: Anna mentions her business to someone and that person has never heard of it.

S: Anna prints up a bunch of fliers to pass out. She enlists Chris’ help.

C: Anna doesn’t have time to work in her business and pass out fliers.

V: At Chris’ suggestion, Anna hires an advertising firm to help promote her business.

C: People visit the shop, but are turned off by how it looks.

V: Chris introduces Anna to Beth, an interior decorator and his fiancée.

Victory: Anna shows Chris that she’s a better choice than Beth.

At that level of detail, you should have enough information to write each scene. You could go even deeper, but at some point, you have to stop outlining and actually write. But now you have a list of what you need to write and a rough idea of how long each should be.

As you create each more detailed section, you will find that the victory of the subsection should be about the same thing as the section heading. Anna hiring an advertising firm is about like saying that she began advertising, but it is more detailed. With that in mind, as you outline, it will be helpful to you if you start with the victory and develop the problem, solution and challenge that fits the victory for that subsection.

There are other ways to outline a story, but you won’t find a simpler method than this.

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About Me

I am the author of both novels and a non-fiction. Stop by my blog, Timothy’s Thoughts, where we mostly talk about plot elements, characters and other things to do with writing fiction, but occasionally get off on other topics, such as platform development and leadership. I even talk about current events or my personal life, from time to time, but mostly we talk about fiction.